Looking at the cover of the book Elvis Costello and Thatcherism, one cannot but associate it with the rather famous photomontage of Margaret Thatcher and Madonna (Blitz, December 1989), converged as one, which asked one of the crucial popular culture-related questions of the decade: was this the epitome of the (female) personality of the 1980s? This time, Elvis Costello's iconic nerdy-cool image, with one half of his NHS glasses visible, is converged with the piercing eye of Margaret Thatcher: his arch-enemy and nemesis throughout most of the 1980s.

This surprising juxtaposition is closely examined by the authors’ fascinating psycho-social exploration of their relationship, as Pilgrim and Ormrod uncover the political and cultural meanings of the Thatcher era, asking how Costello's work ‘reflected about a time and place we have come to label “Thatcherism” or, for some, just “the 80 s”’ (p. 1). Pilgrim and Ormrod, having their academic background in clinical psychology and medical sociology and musicianship and education, respectively, begin their analysis by comparing the background and early career of Costello to that biographical information of Margaret Thatcher (pp. 30–5), and then proceeding to the era of the 1980s.

The very different life trajectories and worldviews are then juxtaposed throughout the book. Costello's restlessness and contrarian attitudes in the rapidly changing world of the 1980s music and entertainment industries, and his relationship with women, feminism and race issues, is analysed in the context of the ever-increasing capitalist and normative professionalism dictated by the ‘neo-Victorian’ philosophy of Margaret Thatcher and the New Right. In connection with this, nostalgia, the US, postmodernism and political and human issues – all the bread and butter of the 1980s zeitgeist – are also explored through the songs, public image and artistic claims of Elvis Costello.

Therefore, by not only looking at the interdependence of Thatcher(ism) and Elvis Costello via themes (p. 183) related to the era of 1980s but also unpicking their relationship by examining their different roots, this book opens new alleyways for considering the relationship between popular music and politics. Costello (born 1958) being a teenager at the fag-end of the Swinging Sixties and Thatcher (born 1925) being a teenager during the end of 1930s recession and WWII form two different frames of mind, frames that dramatically collided during the 1980s. Thatcher's persona was very much the product of the era's puritanism related to the post-WWI Victorian moralism (Campbell Reference Campbell2001, pp. 15–18), quite often in tension with the postwar liberalism, unexpectedly reconstructed as a part of neoliberal ideology: a kind of synthesis of post-Victorian authoritarianism and postwar individualism embodied not only in homo economicus but also in homo consumere.

As a modern and progressive artist, Costello never felt comfortable with individualism defined in this way. However, Ormrod and Pilgrim note that ‘both (Thatcher and Costello) were brought up in Christian households … Christian imagery was to become a touchstone for both, even if used in different ways’ (p. 39). The celebration of conspicuous consumption and hedonistic lifestyles were ‘odd bedfellows’ both with the Victorian moral austerity of Thatcherism and the particular brand of stardom of Costello, but it reflected the continuing influence of 1960s culture both as a continuing revolutionising force and the focus of Americanisation during the 1980s. Costello's Catholic background and Thatcher's Protestantism thus provide an exciting dilemma to be uncovered in the context of the themes provided by this book and embodied by these two different generational experiences. In this connection, they reveal something odd about the 1980s: it was the almost apocalyptic battlefield of both Cold War values and the Victorian and permissive worldviews now seen as forming the synthesis of the Fukuyaman victory of democratic authoritarianism and economic individuality.

While the death of Thatcher in April 2013 makes this legacy and this book ever more topical, all these themes were related to the Costello/Thatcher decade and its cultural/political reconstruction by the ideology that questioned the postwar consensus in Britain and started the age of neoliberalism. However, this legacy has been both celebrated and contested in various ways. Popular cultural industries are still recycling the fashion and pop music of 1980s, and while ironic-nostalgic tones are obvious in this retro-culture, the battles of the effects of the Thatcherite legacy are still continuously fought: both in ‘the real world’ and popular culture.

From the beginning, Costello's role in this was quite straightforward and uncomplicated. He was an outsider among the glitz and glamour of the 1980s. His various musical influences – from 1960s torch songs and his transatlantic songbook to the singer-songwriter tradition and his wide assimilation of new wave styles – made this versatile pop artist difficult to place into the niche marketing of the music industry. Costello's reaction to his marginal and tricky stardom – made especially difficult by the streamlining of the music industry in the 1980s – was to play ‘Macbeth at the Foam Party’ (pp. 183–194): a contrarian, critical and hard to categorise artist who combined in his works a large palette of musical styles from beyond the usual punk/singer-songwriter and new pop/1980s indie divisions. This was exemplified by the eclectic style of his most successful single, ‘Oliver's Army’ (1979, p. 174), combining new wave, 1960s classic pop, disco and even referring to Abba's ‘Dancing Queen’ (1976).

On the whole, Costello's catholic taste and experimentations – extending towards his post-1980s career – could be regarded as a symbolic assault against Thatcherite ideological common sense and its traditionalist and authoritarian dimensions. Although analysis of the Thatcher era through popular music can take different routes – from plain protest and anti-Thatcher songs to ambiguous state-of-the-nation commentary and their ambivalent postmodern parodies of ‘the greed-is-good’ ideology of the 1980s – Costello's most famous political/social-realist protest song, commenting on the Falklands War (‘Shipbuilding’, 1983, pp. 84–92), was miles away from the fashionable preoccupations with the postmodern musical marketplace often celebrated in the transatlantic 1980s pop-funk.

The fascination and ‘special relationship’ with the USA was one rare common theme shared by both Thatcher and Costello, ‘even if these common concerns took them in different directions’ (p. 99). For Costello, it was Anglo-Irishness as found and immersed in the musical products of US culture, while for Thatcher, it was white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism linked to the freedoms of market capitalism. This is one of the important themes explored in this book. Taken in relation to British pop music, Thatcherism's implicit and explicit links to pop culture was the ultra-individuality, consumerism and ‘success-by-any-means-tactics’ of 1980s pop. The new ‘self-starters’ and princes of industry created a pop world in which it was difficult to distinguish between the glorification of consumerism, marketing philosophy, and their subversion through irony. While this postmodern irony was de rigueur for Costello's contemporaries, he could be – according to Elvis Costello and Thatcherism – labelled more as a romantic modernist, who preferred more traditional ideological and cultural attacks against Thatcherism. In the mould of his ideals, Costello's political credibility was always dispersed around different issues through this time – from Rock Against Racism to observations of 1980s life in Britain under Thatcher's rule – and connected to the ‘old-fashioned’ artistic aspirations of the romantic revolutionary (p. 38–41).

When Costello really disclosed his feelings on Thatcher, as in the song ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ (pp. 21–25), he did it with the vitriol and spleen which left no question of his position in this debate. One of the interesting themes, underdeveloped in the book, might then have been a more detailed analysis of Costello's and Thatcher's (sociocultural) personalities related to the eras when they were born and bred. ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ echoes another couple of intense relationships between Thatcher's persona and a popular music artist of the 1980s – most notably Morrissey and Matt Johnson of The The – who expressed their hatred of Thatcher and her policies as true exponents of the counterculture heroism and anti-conservative ideals of the 1960s.Footnote ¹

In connection with this, another theme only briefly visited in this book is Thatcherism's connections to popular culture through its relationship with the 1960s. One of the pre-eminent signs of Thatcherism's regressive modernisation was its overt determination to dismantle the heritage of the 1960s. Costello's role in this is undoubtedly the attempt to connect himself to the progressive singer-songwriter tradition of the 1960s, opposing the anti-1960s message and updating ‘the false hippie dreams’: the sentiment created in his recording of Nick Lowe's ‘What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding’ (1978) commenting on both the impending materialistic individualisation and cynicism towards the ideals of the 1960s. Therefore, there is a continuing argument concerning the legacy of the 1960s and Thatcherism, asking how the 1960s consumer boom was accelerated by Thatcherism and by its radicalised, post-consensus neo-liberal voters: the ‘true heirs’ of the 1960s (Beckett Reference Beckett2010, pp. 144–62).

In the case of Costello, the popular cultural opposition and its politics were, according to Fiske, ‘progressive’. In comparison, Thatcher was a ‘mistress’ of populist rhetoric (Fiske Reference Fiske1989, p. 163). The combination of Thatcherism and popular culture, then, contains a (fruitful) conflict, exemplified by the argument posited by Penny Rimbaud of the anarcho-punk band Crass that ‘Thatcher was an absolute fairy godmother’ (Lynskey Reference Lynskey2013) for the anti-capitalist arguments. All of this indicates that Thatcherism and popular culture form an assemblage of various active forces, often in paradoxical mutual interdependence, to comment on in this era.

This is a book full of rich and original arguments, too many to do justice to here, and it provides insightful perspectives on popular culture's relationship to Thatcherism in the 1980s as well as its continuing legacy. However, the analysis sometimes moves into essentialism, especially when musicianship, pop stardom and the music industry are analysed, but this is only to be mildly lamented given the socio-psychological method used in analysing popular music culture from this new angle.